WASHINGTON — This is the week. After months of ups and downs over whether she would be named chairman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen faces the Senate banking committee on Thursday for her confirmation hearing.

It is a crucial test. Yellen’s qualifications as an economist and central banker are impeccable, but she has less experience in the political game that is a high-profile congressional hearing.

Her 2010 confirmation hearing to become Fed vice chairman was a low-key affair, and she hasn’t testified on Capitol Hill since. She has served in important jobs over the past two decades but has never been under the klieg lights that accompany a nomination to be one of the most powerful humans on Earth.

In the past, her speeches have been parsed closely by professional Fed watchers trying to discern clues about where policy is heading. Now she will find herself broadcast live on the financial networks, with any mistakes or slip-ups prone to ending up on the evening news or “The Daily Show.”

Yellen is a meticulous preparer, and for this huge stage she has surely been hitting the books particularly hard, preparing answers for a wide range of potential questions and participating in “murder boards” with Fed staff members to practice dealing with the senators. It is a particularly fraught moment in that markets are on a razor’s edge looking for clues to whether the Fed will begin slowing its bond-purchase program at its December meeting or sometime next year. Expect big moves in markets based on the subtleties of Yellen’s language about the “quantitative easing” program.

Luckily for her, there’s no reason to think confirmation is in doubt. Republican senators are skeptical of Yellen and worry that she is too soft on inflation — concerns they are likely to voice loudly and repeatedly Thursday. But this is not an appointment that is going to bring on a full-scale confirmation war.

Taking on an impeccably credentialed, ethically clean person who would be the first woman to lead the nation’s central bank because she is doing too much to try to encourage job growth does not make for a smart political strategy, and the tea leaves suggest that is not the one Senate Republicans will take.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has said he will put a hold on the nomination, but that will only slow things and necessitate five Republicans joining Democrats on a procedural vote to allow confirmation to proceed. Things get a little more dicey with threats from Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and John McCain, R-Ariz., to try to stop the nomination if they don’t get the answers they want about the attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, but here, too, it is hard to see all 45 Senate Republicans holding firm on tying up the nomination over unrelated issues.

So what will the hearing itself involve? She is likely to receive strong support from Senate Democrats — she got the nod, after all, in no small part because several of them signaled that they would not support Lawrence Summers for the job.

Ironically, the more that angry, spittle-filled rage emerges from Senate Republicans (although Fed hearings have had a lot less of that since Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning retired from the Senate), the easier Yellen’s job becomes. First, the longer the committee members spend on soliloquies, the less time Yellen has to spend talking and potentially making a mistake.

Second, if skeptics of her nomination focus solely on the risks of inflation emerging from the Fed’s easy-money policies, Yellen will probably have her answer prepared every which way. She is more likely to say something that sends markets into a tailspin or gives critics ammunition to vote against her nomination if she is forced to answer less-obvious questions, or inflation questions framed in novel ways.

A particular minefield could be fiscal policy. She and most Fed leaders believe that spending cuts and tax hikes this year are slowing the recovery, and that Congress has been misguided in how it has handled fiscal policy. But she also must respect the boundaries between central bankers and political authorities — the implicit agreement that politicians don’t tell the Fed how to set monetary policy and the Fed doesn’t tell Congress how to set fiscal policy (the reality is always muddier than that, of course). So Yellen will have to honestly critique fiscal policy, while not venturing too far down a path of compromising Fed independence.

Assuming Yellen is confirmed, Thursday is only the beginning of her life as a public figure.

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